At the launch of the book Science and Innovation for Development on 19 January, co-author Sir Gordon Conway said: “It doesn’t matter where the technology comes from, it matters that it is appropriate.”

Too often international development researchers, policy makers and practitioners get caught up in the source of a technology, and use this as the metric for whether it will be successful. The way a technology is designed, the country it comes from, the type of institution that produced it – while all important considerations – are not as important as whether the product is appropriate.

An appropriate technology is accessible, affordable, easy-to-use and maintain, effective – and most importantly it serves a real need.

For example, a rice seed that has been bred or engineered to mature faster can be appropriate anywhere the variety thrives. Local farmers have a need for such characteristics, regardless of whether the seed comes from local efforts or from global centres like the International Rice Research Institute.

Many scientists and policy makers in developed countries also often hold on to the idea that you can’t apply different types of technology to the same problem. In fact, this is often exactly what is needed.

For example, for farmers in drought-prone areas to deal with persistent and increasing water shortages they need solutions which draw from the full range of scientific innovation. These can include ‘traditional’ water conservation techniques and planting methods such as the ‘zai’ system in West Africa, where farmers use small holes filled with manure and the extensive underground termite tunnels that result, to both capture water and recycle soil nutrients.

Then there are ‘intermediate’ technologies such as drip irrigation, where plastic tubing is used to apply small amounts of water to each individual plant, and ‘new platform’ technologies such as cereal varieties that are genetically modified to survive, and even prosper, in drought conditions.

Farmers should have access to all types of solutions – so they can pick and choose the best combination for their own field, and adapt and innovate as conditions change.

I came across a telling example of the strong bias which some hold for particular sources of technology at a recent plant biotechnology conference. A number of presenters at the event introduced the methods they had been working on to control weeds, in particular the parasitic weed Striga.

On one side was the biological systems approach: intercropping enemies of the weed with the maize crop with plants that suppress Striga. The other side advocated a technological solution: breeding resistance to the herbicide that kills the weed into the maize seeds themselves, so that the seeds can be dipped into the herbicide. The treated maize seeds kill the parasitic seeds in the ground, allowing the maize to grow and the environmental impact to be minimised.

Both systems have drawbacks – more labour and local knowledge needed for biological control, and higher research costs and risk of resistance developing for the seed modification approach.

So why not use both? Why not work together?

Instead I saw the two sides actively arguing. Then when another presenter introduced the idea of increasing the use of conventional herbicides in Africa it was met with immediate derision, partly due to the source of the herbicides (US manufacturers). Most did not consider the fact that, if applied in an educated and selective manner, conventional herbicides may be a great tool for poor farmers.

But this may be changing. As Science and Innovation for Development’s other co-author Jeff Waage stated in the book: “Between the extremes of a technological ‘silver bullet’ approach to development science, and the belief that local and intermediate technologies are the only legitimate approach, there is emerging today a new community of scientists dedicated to an inclusive view of appropriate science for development”.

About Sara Delaney

Sara Delaney joined Imperial College in July 2009 to work on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded project ‘Africa and Europe: Partnerships in Food and Farming’. She is assisting Gordon Conway with the writing of a second edition of his 1999 book The Doubly Green Revolution. She recently completed work with the UK Collaborative on Development Sciences (UKCDS) and the London International Development Centre (LIDC), supporting the publication of the book Science and Innovation for Development. Sara studied biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University and ‘Science, Society and Development’ at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). From 2005-2007 she served as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, working in the water and sanitation sector.

2 comments to 'What is an appropriate technology?'

Excellent post. Back in the 1980s I had research links with the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas at Tel Hadya in Syria. One of the most impressive pieces of ‘appropriate technology’ that I witnessed there involved simply planting out all the varieties of chickpea from their germplasm bank in autumn rather than spring and letting the climate select the most cold-tolerant lines. Chickpea was traditionally spring-sown and so suffers from summer drought but by using these climate-selected lines to produce autumn sown varieties that could mature faster and avoid drought considerable yield increases were achieved. The problem with effective ‘appropriate technology’ like this is that it will never make it into the high-impact research journals that status-conscious, RAE-driven British scientists are now obsessed with, so research on issues like stress tolerance is inevitable focused on using the most complex, clever technology at the molecular level which may well take much longer to have a direct impact on the pressing problems of food security.

Pest Control London26 May, 2010

Have you heard about the method used by armies to obtain drinking water in baron environments, using a huge area of cling film to siphon moisture rising off a desert surface? Simple enough technology but who’s doing this?